Jonas Heide Smiths notesblog

Forward marines!!

Last night I had the dubious honour of playing Dawn of War on national television – in a segment on video game ratings. Note to self: The whole “talk while playing” idea probably sounds better than it actually is (come to think of it, it sounds pretty dumb in the first place).

Tags: Computerspil, Personligt

In Danish: ITU-studerende søges til 15-20 timers arbejde

Jeg søger en ITU-studerende til “kodning” af transkriberet samtale. Arbejdet går ud på at kategorisere hver udtalelse i en transkriberet tekst vha. PC-programmet nVivo.

Arbejdet kan udføres fra en hvilken som helst PC. Arbejdet kræver ingen særlige forudsætninger, men kendskab til computerspil (som samtalen omhandler) og erfaring med behandling af kvalitative data er en fordel.

Arbejdet skal udføres inden 10/11 (ca.).

Aflønning sker efter den relevante overenskomst. Send mig en mail hvis du er interesseret eller har spørgsmål (smith@itu.dk).

Mvh,
Jonas Heide Smith

Tags: ITU

Low bandwidth still rules: SMS messages sent in Denmark

I once used this graph for teaching. It’s now updated and blogged.
2006 numbers are based on the first 6 months.
Population: 5,4 million

Tags: Nye medier

Player rating systems

Peer-2-peer rating systems work quite well in systems like eBay and Slashdot.

But they do so because User A has no real interest in User B’s future. In brief: A has no real reason to be dishonest.

Not so for online gamers. Here a rating can be used strategically. You may get angry with someone, but you may also see a personal advantage (in terms of relative score) in bad-mouthing that person.

Thus, we essentially need a system which can

• distinguish between fair and unfair ratings OR
• in which ratings cannot be used strategically

But what on Earth, I ask you, would that look like?

What about (just brainstorming):

• Limited number of total karma points (you can’t just toss them aroud for the heck of it)
• A player can only give a limited amount of points to any given player (to minimize the consequence of evil ratings)
• The rating is given secretively (you can’t trust/threaten someone to be nice if you are)
• Karma points cannot be given at all until you’re fairly high-level (or whatever) to avoid people making dummy accounts to boost their own rating
• You only see ratings of your friends (or those you’ve rated positively) so the truthfulness of your rating actually affects your friends

Any good ideas?

Tags: Computerspil, Personligt, Tillid

But the Evil that I would not…

In many systems it seems, paradoxically, to be the case that only rulers/managers generally opposed to a certain development can actually execute it.

• In my old pre-school district of Gentofte, traditionally highly conservative, they are now using freakish therapy techniques on young school children.
• In Danish politics, large welfare cuts have almost always been executed by left-wing governments.
• In Israeli politics, only hardliners (often former generals) have stood much of a chance of convincing the Israeli people that the decision to surrender land is tenable.

I suppose you only trust the integrity of rulers when they are seen to work against their supposed “interests”. Wonder if this phenomenon has some fancy name…

Oh, I just thought of a nice Machievellian variation: In the (poor) movie The Siege Bruce Willis is a gun-happy general. He’s in a meeting with the chiefs of staff (of whoever) and they are debating whether to send the army into New York City. Willis, looking sincere, comments: “I urge you to reconsider. The army is a broadsword, not a scalpel”. To which someone replies “That is exactly why you are the man for the job”.
Quoted from memory.